For Floryan Varennes, care is never seen as a neutral gesture. He explores its complex zones, where protection verges on control, where healing can be transformed into constraint. Drawing on critical theories, he questions the mechanisms by which our bodies are taken in hand, framed and sometimes disciplined under the pretext of preservation. His works, at the crossroads of the medical and the military, reveal care as a field of tension between attention and domination, repair and control.
Hanging like a technological talisman, the work takes the form of an armoured bud, a symbol of active protection. This embryonic form, at once vulnerable and tending towards blossoming, embodies the idea of a regeneration that can only come about through defence and isolation. This approach is in line with the thinking put forward by Bruno Latour in ‘Nous n'avons jamais été modernes’, where he stresses the importance of rethinking our relationship with nature and technology, recognising the hybridity of the world. Latour argues for an approach in which nature and culture are no longer seen as separate domains, but as interdependent entities, in an “assemblage” that he describes as “modernity” - a modernity that would be founded precisely on the integration of technology into our natural cycles of survival and transformation. Its crystalline form, ribbed with wires and metallic elements, evokes a technological finery. The bud, far from being a simple promise of renewal, becomes a battlefield between regeneration and control. The fusion of biotechnology and defence devices echoes Latour's idea that our era requires new “modes of coordination” between the living and the technical, where technology is a means of maintaining a fragile balance in a threatened world. Stella Splendens (Bud) examines this cohabitation between nature and technology, where survival requires ambivalent compromises and strategic hybridisation. This armoured bud, far from being a simple metaphor for growth, becomes a symbol of technological ecology, where defence, isolation and regeneration combine to create a new order of coexistence.
Stella Splendens 1.2 (Bud)
Medical instruments, medical tubes, medical pvc, stainless steel fasteners, rivets, rings
For Floryan Varennes, care is never seen as a neutral gesture. He explores its complex zones, where protection verges on control, where healing can be transformed into constraint. Drawing on critical theories, he questions the mechanisms by which our bodies are taken in hand, framed and sometimes disciplined under the pretext of preservation. His works, at the crossroads of the medical and the military, reveal care as a field of tension between attention and domination, repair and control.
Hanging like a technological talisman, the work takes the form of an armoured bud, a symbol of active protection. This embryonic form, at once vulnerable and tending towards blossoming, embodies the idea of a regeneration that can only come about through defence and isolation. This approach is in line with the thinking put forward by Bruno Latour in ‘Nous n'avons jamais été modernes’, where he stresses the importance of rethinking our relationship with nature and technology, recognising the hybridity of the world. Latour argues for an approach in which nature and culture are no longer seen as separate domains, but as interdependent entities, in an “assemblage” that he describes as “modernity” - a modernity that would be founded precisely on the integration of technology into our natural cycles of survival and transformation. Its crystalline form, ribbed with wires and metallic elements, evokes a technological finery. The bud, far from being a simple promise of renewal, becomes a battlefield between regeneration and control. The fusion of biotechnology and defence devices echoes Latour's idea that our era requires new “modes of coordination” between the living and the technical, where technology is a means of maintaining a fragile balance in a threatened world. Stella Splendens (Bud) examines this cohabitation between nature and technology, where survival requires ambivalent compromises and strategic hybridisation. This armoured bud, far from being a simple metaphor for growth, becomes a symbol of technological ecology, where defence, isolation and regeneration combine to create a new order of coexistence.
